After reading “this“ several days ago, I’ve been unable to shake it from consciousness. “This” is driving the underlying current of my blog post shares of African animals. Even this herd of elephants who wake to the morning sun and march in Tsavo National Park, seem to be doing so solemnly.

A worker at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya shares a tender moment with an elephant calf. Your Shot photographer I. Ogila explains, “When poachers kill adult elephants for ivory, the young ones are usually left desperate and unlikely to survive alone in the wild.” But by being in the care of the Trust, “they get a chance to live and die of old age.”

You’d have one two-fingered hand swinging from your face – a hand as sensitive as tumescent genitals, but which could smash a wall or pick a cherry. With that hand you’d explore your best friends’ mouths, just for the sake of friendship.

you’d smell water two miles away and the flowers at your feet

Grumbles from trucks and cabs would shudder through the toxic ground, tickle the lamellar corpuscles in your feet and ricochet up your bones…You’d hear with your feet, and your femurs would be microphones

As you walked 10 miles for your breakfast you’d chatter with your friends in 10 octaves

You’d have the happiest kind of political system, run by wise old women, appointed for their knowledge of the world and their judgment, uninterested in hierarchy for hierarchy’s sake, and seeking the greatest good for the greatest number.

Elephants know, from distances well beyond the reach of ordinary senses, that other elephants were on the way…from 50 miles away

Why do elephants seek out other elephants?…because they like other elephants.

When a bereaved elephant mother carries her dead baby round on her tusks, or trails miserably behind the herd for weeks, her head hanging down, she’s grieving. When other elephants sit for hours around the body of a dead elephant, they’re mourning. When they cover an elephant corpse with soil or vegetation, or move elephant bones, they’re being reverential. When they cover a dead human, or build a protective wall of sticks around a wounded human, they’re showing an empathic acknowledgment of our shared destiny that we’d do well to learn.

You’re a city elephant. You’ll inhabit the city much more intensely and satisfactorily than most of its human denizens. All your senses will be turned fully on. You won’t, like most woefully unsensual humans, using only your eyes.

If they’re people, they’re embarrassingly better people than we are. They build better communities; they live at peace with themselves and aren’t, unlike us, actively psychopathic towards other species.

Be careful, though. You’re likely to end up dead because someone wants a couple of your teeth.

The work of French artist Fabien Morello, 35, involves creative combinations of dreams, experiences, and his early childhood imagination. He blurs the line between reality and fiction. Mérelle’s complex works are small and he pays close attention to detail, two qualities that can be seen in this particular work, entitled Pentateuque. The piece is a whimsical sculpture that depicts a man, balancing the weight of an elephant on his back. It is made out of resin, paint, hair and fabric, and stands only 30 x 27 x 12 inches. The three dimensional form is a replica of the artist’s original Pentateuch 2010 ink drawing, both of which visually interpret the phrase “carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.”